Reuel Schiller, Forging Rivals

Forging Rivals is a creative, comprehensively researched, eminently readable work that makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the late twentieth-century American liberalism. Schiller is a professor of law at UC-Hastings, with degrees in Law and History from Virginia. This remarkable book is his first, although he has law-review articles on labor law, administrative law, and legal history going back into the late ‘1990s. Its subject is the long decay of the political alliance between organized labor and civil-rights advocates in San Francisco between the end of World War II and the early 1970s; although the book’s geographical scope is narrow, one of its greatest strengths is the way in which it effectively uses its fine-grained analysis of labor politics in one city to elucidate what may be the most important long-term change in late twentieth-century American politics. Schiller’s thesis is that New Deal liberalism ran aground on a fundamental contradiction between the labor-relations law for which the union movement had fought during the New Deal and the fair-employment practices law for which civil-rights advocates fought during the postwar period. The former, of which the NLRA was the crowning achievement, synthesized majoritarian rule within unions with guarantees of seniority for individual workers and arbitration as the exclusive remedy for disputes with employers. The latter, epitomized by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, took a counter-majoritarian approach by providing judicial and administrative remedies for individual workers who suffered job discrimination, not only at the hands of employers but of unions as well. Both strategies inhered in the pluralist, New Deal version of liberalism. Together, they sustained the alliance between organized labor and African-Americans on which the postwar Democratic regime crucially depended. The synthesis, however, also depended on the moderate Keynesian policies of progressive taxation, social welfare spending, and government job creation that also characterized New Deal policy. Relations between unions and civil-rights organizations, never entirely comfortable, turned sour after the early 1960s when new jobs gradually became harder to come by and minority guarantees against discrimination came into conflict with union entitlements to job seniority and political autonomy.

Arbitration · Contradiction · Labour law · Liberalism · New Deal · Political science · Politics · Sociology · American History and Culture · Judicial and Constitutional Studies · Labor Movements and Unions · Law